Google Breaks The Billion Barrier With Record Number Of Users In A Single Month

The rise of Google continues unabated as it emerged today that more than a billion visitors used its websites in May. It marks the first time an internet company has hit the landmark figure, according to ComScore, a company which compiles web data.

The second most popular destination was Microsoft, with 905 million unique visitors, and third was Facebook, which has grown by 30 per cent in the past year, attracting 714 million visitors in the month.

Google’s traffic has risen by 8.4 per cent over the past 12 months and Microsoft’s by 15 percent.

The growth of Facebook forced Yahoo into fourth place. It had 689million unique visitors, an increase of 10.8 per cent.

ComScore sampled the browsing habits of two million internet users worldwide.

When the firm first measured online traffic in 2006, Google had just under 500million monthly unique visitors and Microsoft was the most popular web destination with 539million hits.

However, Google is now number one thanks to adding Gmail and YouTube to its portfolio.

Despite Google’s overwhelming popularity, however, internet users spent more time surfing Facebook – they browsed the social network for 250 billion minutes in May, compared to 200 billion minutes on Google.